Solaren Corp, founded by a former spacecraft engineer, says it has developed a technology that would make it commercially viable within the next seven years to transmit electricity generated in space to a terrestrial power grid.

PG&E; announced this week that it had agreed to buy 200 megawatts of electricity from Solaren starting in 2016. The deal has yet to be approved by California state government regulators and PG&E; has not put any money into Solaren, but the promise alone has turned the notion of space based solar power from fantasy to reality.

"There is a very serious possibility they can make this work," said PG&E;'s spokesman Jonathan Marshall.

The technical theory behind the idea is that solar radiation in space is many times the power of the beams that reach us through the earth's atmosphere. Solaren believes it can convert that radiation into radio-frequency transmissions, which are then beamed down to Earth, converted into regular electricity and fed into the grid.